Whatever this game is, it's a master of the art of making you grind. Do you still enjoy it?

Yes. It's not as grindy as you might think. First off, resource nodes are instanced, so you never have to fight other players for them. That alone is probably almost enough reason to switch from WoW.

Second, I actually like taking the scenic route. I don't actually grind mat farming much--I get most of what I need from simply wandering the map looking for events and whatnot. (This weapon--a high-end, entirely optional one--will require a decent amount of farming. But notice "high-end" and "entirely optional.")

@Fox I have all the aquatic precursors from the collections and I've finished all the T1 collections except for Sunrise, but I'm probably never going to get any further than that since I can't fathom having to spend so much on even the first precursor that immediately gets salvaged.

I have 4 gifts of mastery and a gift of maguuma, but holy shit gift of fortune/mystic tribute is expensive.

I'll work on the rest of the build first, probably, and then see what happens as I get closer. I see I have to get a rare (?) drop from a lot of the world bosses, too, in addition to a crapload of other stuff.

I haven't unlocked Vol. II yet anyway, so I know I have a long way to go, but I'm working on this around other stuff.

@FrostCat I got the Dredge Building Materials last night, but I haven't high a high enough fractal level to do the last two instances--all the groups I joined were doing like level 5. I might have to start my own group in LFG, I guess, if I don't get lucky tonight.

In between, I worked on raising Artificing and Weaponsmithing so I can make ascended gear.

@FrostCat It's probably just as cheap to save the gold and buy Spark from the trading post, rather than do the Deldrimor Steel components and such for the precursor quest chain.

They tried to balance the precursor quest chain costs so they'd be roughly equal to the "buy one someone got lucky with" for the first generation legendaries. They didn't account sufficiently for the amount of market fuckery that was going to happen after the expansion, so they mostly overshot the quest chain costs, and are basically just going to wait for things to balance out naturally (read: do sweet fuk all)

@Fox@FrostCat
You can also throw in dungeon token exotics. Which has the added bonus of making you gold you can use for the other parts of the legendary (aka the gift of fortune). So you can do Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity, Honor of the Waves (eew), and Arah (ha ha ha) explorable paths, and then convert 210-390 tokens into one exotic (depending on weapon you're going for -- Spark is 300 tokens per exotic = 1200 tokens for the first flush and 900 thereafter).

Of course, I noticed that using all "named Exotics" (e.g. a specific name, and not Berserker's Super Dagger of Awesomeness or the dungeon daggers) seemed to have a higher chance of returning a "named" Exotic from the forge. But that could easily be small sample size Olympics too. But my theory (and I had seen some other fan sites speculating the same when I started doing it) was that Spark counts as a "named" Exotic and that your chances were thus better using the cheapest named Exotics you could get your hands on (which was around 2.5g per dagger back when I was trying).

Eh, you can get 300 tokens in less than an hour for CoF or CoE (assuming the hold event timing is in your favor), and every 8 distinct paths you run give you an additional 150 tokens of your choice (so hold your nose and do 2 HoTW paths in about an hour). Boom, now you have 3-4 hours in, you've earned 10 gold and a bunch of trash loot (aka crafting mats), and 3 pieces to flush down the toilet.

Basically one flush a night. Sure, it's a bit grindy, but if you're going for a legendary, it's not because you're expecting to get it at the rate of D3 loot.